A love of fish: markets, seasons and how to choose it fresh

Par Gabriel Goldberg 23 October 2026 8 min read

In short: fresh fish has bright, bulging eyes, vivid red gills, firm flesh and a smell of the sea. Buy it from a busy counter, choose what is in season rather than a fixed list, and cook it simply: salt, high heat, lemon. Belgian health authorities recommend eating it once or twice a week, including one oily fish. Some people collect museums. I collect fishmongers. In every city I visit there is a moment — early, ideally — when my feet lead me towards the smell of crushed ice and iodine, towards the sound of scales and knives. That is where, in front of a counter, I understand a country best: what it catches, what it loves, how it talks to its customers. Here is my notebook, photo by photo, and everything fish has taught me. Pink sea bream, a dark wreckfish with its mouth open and red prawns on ice at a Palma fishmonger, each fish tagged with the Mallorcan local-catch label. Fish: a love story that starts on the ice People often say we love meat for pleasure and fish out of reason. For me it is the other way round. Fish is the freest thing on our plate: it grew up in the sea, not in a production plan, and it arrives with the day's tide, never the same twice. A great chef once told me that meat can be cooked ten ways and fish a hundred — that is where creativity lives, as I wrote in my piece on Crab Club in Flagey . I would add: that is also where truth lives. Fish does not lie. Fresh, it is sublime; tired, no sauce can save it. Saint-Tropez: the fish market under the mosaics…